Hi! I think you need to work a bit more on the sky and place the sun where you are adding the effect from! Otherwise your light sources are at conflict! :-)

Hey there! My suggestion is to add some haze and darken the shadows. Also when you do the postwork, loose some of those sun-streaks and/or soften them up. Good luck.

I would suggest using imported mesh trees for close ups. Also do a mask render so you can put the lens flare streaks behind the mountain. But here again with a mask render it will render the shape of the object used to make the trees. ( mask rendering does not recognize material transparency) If you need to know how to do the mask render and use it in the paint program, let us know I or someone will explain it.

Stephen Ray: thank you for the suggestions. I had to lose the tree in the foreground because it was too close to the camera and kept the mask from working. The resulting render was not as good as I expected as I am not happy with the rings in the sky but I got the idea that I could make a mask of just the sun and rays and somehow apply that in photoshop,corel or psp.(i'm thinking that the more i use psp7 that i'm gonna have ta buy it.) Rochr: I read about the effect so brilliantly pulled off by Stephen Ray where you post in a sunset at some other time of the day especially so the scene is not in shadow. I think that I will have to experiment with the amount of shadow so maybe i can pull off the illusion. also the rays could be softer, ...perhaps as I learn more about post effects. humorix: the sky was just a quicky so i could get the render online quickly as I wanted to play around with it this evening.as we all know a decent custom made sky can add hours to a render. i guess the position of the sun can make all the difference and a decent sky too. - thank you all for your help.